by Nina Revoyr
He’d moved there in the summer of ’42. Graduation took place in June, but the event was pointless without Frank and David Hara and Steve Yamamoto, and the other Japanese kids who’d been herded away that spring. In July he married Janie, and the two of them moved into the one-room cottage behind her parents’ house in Watts. Janie’s parents had lived in Watts since it was Mudtown, a country village with dusty wagon paths and hoot owls sitting on fence posts. It had been mixed then, still was, although the scales were being tipped by the influx of Southern blacks, who were mostly settling south of 103rd. A week after the wedding, Victor went down to the shipyard in Long Beach, where the bosses who’d been shaking their heads no for so long were finally, because of the war, nodding yes.
Like most of the other black workers the shipyard hired during the war, Victor was assigned to the night shift. Getting home was no problem—there was an 8:30 Red Car from Long Beach to Watts, and even though the train broke down regularly or stopped to let freight trains pass, he could usually count on getting home by 9:30 or 10:00. But getting to the shipyard was another story, a new puzzle every day. The Red Car didn’t run that late at night, and Victor didn’t own a car. So every evening, before his shift, or during cigarette breaks, he’d have to arrange a ride for the next night. Finally, Pipes Sullivan took care of this problem. Sullivan was his leaderman—their gang welded and riveted gun emplacements—and he lived on 104th Street. He and his brother Horn restored an old Buick they’d bought from the junkyard and charged a nickel a ride to be part of their car pool. So every night, seven young men would crowd into the seats, long lanky arms and legs all jockeying for room, the men laughing, smoking, passing a bottle around, the car chugging through the streets of L.A. Although their shift started at midnight, Victor left about 10:30 every evening. The trip took forty minutes, and they had to pick up all the others at Imperial Courts and Nickerson Gardens, the housing projects built to accommodate the war workers. And the Sullivans and Timmy Grace would wash up at the shipyard since the tiny apartments in the old split-up house where they lived were not equipped with bathing facilities. They washed at night, because the foreman who came on in the morning objected to seeing Negroes in the showers. And Timmy and the Sullivans had to be clean; they had women to see in the morning.
The hours were long and the pay was low and Victor barely saw his wife—just between 8:00 p.m., when she got home from cleaning the Burns house, and 10:30, when they heard the honk of the Buick. Victor and Janie had time only to eat a quick dinner, which was usually made up of the cheapest cuts of meat—the ham hocks, the neck bones, the tongue. They would catch up on their day and then lie down for a while on their mattress if the mood arranged it. But it was fine, they were making it, until the swing shift started letting out early.
While Tim Grace and the Sullivans were inside washing up, Victor stayed out in the yard with Bill, Harris, and Colter, having a final cigarette, a final joke before their shift. Usually, they punched in as the swing shift was ending, and they nodded at the occasional colored men mixed in with the hordes of white women and the few white men who’d been rejected from the fighting. But in the fall of ’43, without warning or explanation, the swing shift started getting out at a quarter to twelve. Rumor had it that the foreman had lost his senses over a whore who could only achieve orgasm if he entered her precisely at midnight. But whatever the reason, the crowd of four-to-twelvers began to pass through the doors while Victor and his friends were still out in the yard. Some of the just-released women would gather on the other side of the entrance, smoking and laughing, complaining loudly that the war had thinned out the pool of available men, leaving them precious few to pick between. Victor and his friends ignored them, resenting their presence, hushed their voices and tightened their circle. But one night about a week after the women had started to gather, one of them left the group and walked over. Victor watched her approach—he couldn’t imagine what she wanted—noting the white cotton shirt which was now smudged with grease, the denim pants, the fake leather shoes. A few tufts of red hair poked out from beneath the white rag on her head, and as she got closer, she removed the cloth, shaking out the thick hair that reached down to her shoulders. The men went instantly stiff and swept their eyes around the yard. But the woman seemed not to notice, and she made a bee-line for Victor.
“I’m out of smokes,” she said when she reached them. “You got any?”
Victor glanced at his friends, who shrugged, and then over at the group of women, who were watching him closely.
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, careful to avoid her eyes. “But it seem like your friends already got some.”
The woman smiled, exposing teeth that were crooked and yellow. Despite her stylish haircut and just-applied rouge, she looked aged and worn, thumbed-over. “They do, honey, but they’re sick of me asking. Why don’t you be nice now and give me a smoke?”
At “honey,” all the men looked around again, with more urgency and fear. Their hands fiddled with cigarettes, with loose strings on their shirts, with the suddenly itchy skin on the backs of their necks. Victor looked down at the woman’s shoes, debating whether it was safer to give her a cigarette and maybe overstep his bounds, or not to give her a cigarette and appear disrespectful. Finally, he pulled a pack out of his front shirt pocket, tilted it, tapped it against his palm, and offered the pack with a single cigarette sticking out of the top.
“Thanks, sugar,” said the woman. And when she reached over to take the smoke, her hand closed lightly over Victor’s and lingered a moment. “My name’s Peggy,” she told him as she pulled her hand away. “It’s good to make your acquaintance, Victor. I’ll pay you back tomorrow.”
And as she returned to her friends, Victor was so shaken by the way she’d touched his hand that he didn’t realize she’d somehow known his name.
All the men were relieved when it was time to punch in. Victor spent his whole shift looking over his shoulder, and on the Red Car the next morning, Harris and Colter told what they had learned from their fellow tackers—that this whitewoman named Peggy liked her men young, strong, and black; that she’d noticed Victor her first night smoking outside with her friends; that she’d asked some of the colored men who worked in the copper shop with her if they knew the tall oak-brown boy with the dimple in his chin.
That night, as they smoked, she came over again, talking more, staying longer, trying to engage the other men. All of them, including Victor, said as little as they could, but the whitewoman didn’t seem to notice. By the third night, Victor felt more capable of standing his ground, but then, a week later, Peggy asked if he had a girlfriend.
“No, ma’am. I got a wife,” he said, and his voice swelled with pride.
The whitewoman tilted her head a bit, considering him with mock disapproval. “A wife? A handsome young boy like you? Now what’d you go and do that for?”
“We been together a long time, ma’am. Since we was fourteen.”
“Your little wife, does she work, too?”
“Yes, ma’am. She cleans house for a family up in West L.A.”
The woman smiled a bit now. “So you don’t see much of each other, do you? You must get real lonely.” And her mouth did something with “lonely” that made it sound like something else. Victor just kept staring at her hand, where she rolled a cigarette between her fingers. The other men looked around again, their eyes settling on a couple of whitemen standing off in the distance. They didn’t want to be there, but they weren’t about to leave Victor alone with this hungry whitewoman who didn’t seem to notice or understand or care what kind of danger she was putting him into.
It was almost a relief to find the cat in his locker. At first, Victor thought it was alive, despite the strange position (propped up on its hind legs with its front paws pressed against the wall), because of the open eyes, which looked up at the shelf where his extra shirts lay folded. But then he noticed how flat the green eyes were, like calm, dirty water, and when he lifted the little
body out, it was rigor mortis—stiff. He lay the cat on top of the bench and looked it over—it had dull black hair, a thin body, a long skinny tail, and no mark to tell him how it had met its death. He felt no revulsion, only sadness, and a strong, sudden current of fear. But he’d been waiting for something to happen; had not gone anywhere—not the bathroom, not outside, not over to catch the Red Car—without taking at least two other men with him, and he felt justified now, corroborated. He wrapped the cat in a dirty towel and dropped it in the trash. Then he changed into his work shirt and blue denim overalls and walked over to the outfitting dock.
There were other, smaller signals, which Victor tried to ignore. The sneers from the whitemen as he moved around the shipyard. The way some of the larger men, like Trip Stevenson, bumped him as he passed them on the gangway, once clipping him so hard that he was knocked to the floor. The loud conversations during breaks about black and white babies being even worse than regular niggers.
Through those weeks, Peggy kept bothering Victor, first outside, and then, when he and his friends stopped smoking there in an effort to avoid her, inside, on the outfitting dock, even following him onto the ship. The Sullivans, who usually visited their Long Beach women in the morning, stopped seeing them so they could drive Victor home. The previous winter, eight black men had been beaten in separate incidents outside the shipyard, two so badly that they never returned—and that was simply for having the audacity to work there. No telling what would happen with a whitewoman in the mix.
Throughout those few weeks, the air at the shipyard seemed thin, dry, sharp enough to cut. Every evening, when Victor left his house, he kissed Janie and pulled her close, and kissed Christopher, their new son, and his wife laughed at his intensity, not knowing where it came from.
He felt like a man waiting out his execution, and then one night, Peggy sat down on a bench beside him.
“You want to have breakfast with me tomorrow?” she asked. “I could pick you up at eight.” She punctuated her question with a light touch on his arm, three fingers hovering and alighting like butterfly wings. He felt a shudder go through him that he knew she mistook for excitement. Their backs were to the group of whitemen lounging by the rail, and Victor felt the air go even sharper, the collective suck of breath, at Peggy’s question, at her butterfly touch. He didn’t dare to look behind him, but he said, voice shaking, loud enough for the whitemen to hear, “No, thank you, ma’am. I got to get on home.”
That touch was the final insult, and he knew it. All the next week, his friends surrounded him, always, men covering his left and right, his front and back. But they didn’t protect, didn’t think to protect, the one place where he was vulnerable. On Monday afternoon, Victor woke up around five and went up to his in-laws’ house to play with Christopher. Janie wasn’t there at eight, which was when she usually got home. Nor was she there by eight-thirty, or nine or nine-thirty. They waited, Victor and his in-laws, with growing concern, until finally, Victor decided to go and look for her. He walked quickly to the bus stop where she usually got off, but nobody was there. Then he started home, slowly, listening and looking, and as he passed Cordelia’s Beauty Shop, he heard a quiet moan. He stopped and waited. Another moan—from there, in the alley. He ran around the corner and saw his wife on the ground. Her shoes and purse were scattered, her sweater was ripped, her white domestic’s dress shoved up around her hips. She was curled against the wall, as if asking it for comfort. Victor heard a sound come out of him that was not quite human; he rushed over, knelt down, and rolled her over. Her lip was split, her eye was swollen, there was a golf-ball-sized welt on her cheek, and dried specks of blood covered her chin and forehead. Victor choked back his own tears and tried to sound strong. “I’m here, baby, it’s all right. They won’t hurt you no more.” He carried her home, yelling to her parents as he reached the door that they should put the baby away. All that night he and her parents stayed with her—cleaned her off, put her in bed, pressed ice packs to her head. He thought of work only once—at ten-thirty, when the Sullivans honked—and then shoved the thought out of his mind.
By morning, it was clear she’d be all right, and she did not lose the baby that was three months inside her. After crying off and on through the night, Victor felt empty and dazed, and when the Sullivans picked him up the next evening, all the men in the car stayed silent, but they kept touching him, laying hands on his head, on his still-shaking shoulders and arms. In the locker room, as Victor got dressed for work, one of Mr. DeMarco’s men said that the boss wanted to see him. Victor knew what was coming. When DeMarco fired him for missing a day of work, Victor didn’t even try to explain. And out on the dock, when Trip Stevenson and the other whitemen sneered, confirming what he already knew, he felt too lost and tired even to conjure up rage. The whitewoman wasn’t there that night—maybe they’d gotten her, too—and Victor never saw or heard of her again.
It only took Victor a few days to get another job—at Bethlehem Steel, which was right there in Watts. And he was assigned to a day shift, nine to five, so he saw a lot more of his wife. It had taken her six days to feel well enough to get out of bed, but her employers were more sympathetic than Victor’s, and welcomed her back when she was ready. At first, Victor’s extra time at home seemed like a good thing; Janie had nightmares almost every night and would start shaking uncontrollably during the day. But slowly, over the next several months, everything started to burden him. He didn’t like the dull weight of Janie beside him in the bed. He couldn’t stand to sit at the table with her and eat another meal in silence. He couldn’t endure the wails of the just-born baby girl. But most of all, he couldn’t bear to look at his wife, to see the face and lips and dull sad eyes of the woman he had failed to protect. Several men from the plant lived there in the neighborhood, and Victor began to go out with them after their shift, having a drink or two over at the Downbeat on Central, or playing cards at Penny’s Barbershop on 103rd. When he’d get home late, smelling of whiskey, Janie would fix her eyes on him and ask where he’d been. And because he couldn’t stand hurting her, he began to get angry and yell that he was just relaxing after a hard day’s work. They fought over his hours, over money, over the perfume she once detected on his collar. And then one night, exasperated after yet another fight, he threw his hands up and walked toward the door.
“Where you going?” Janie demanded, fist on her hip.
“Friend’s place. I can’t sleep in the same house as you.”
“You going to see a woman?”
“Naw, girl, don’t be foolish.” But he was already thinking of the perfume woman, how glad she’d be to see him, how her eyes didn’t measure him against some silent expectation and decide that he came up short.
“So you just gonna walk out of here and leave me with your babies?”
“Well, I know the first one’s mine, anyway.” He didn’t know why he said this; he didn’t believe the thought behind it; knew she was pregnant when he found her in the alley. But a canyon cracked open between them now and he could barely make her out on the other side. She just stared at him and nodded, as if understanding something, and then walked over to the crib and picked up the baby. The space she created that held herself and her children no longer had room for Victor. He knew it. Without saying another word, he turned and walked out the door.
Victor moved into a room above a liquor store in the only place besides Watts and the Mesa where Negroes were welcome—Little Tokyo, renamed Bronzeville, which had been emptied by the war. Where just two years earlier every face had been yellow, now every face was black. Negroes were running businesses with names like “Yamashita Clothing” and “Ushimoto Dry Goods.” They inherited, too, the cramped and crumbling apartments, the lack of plumbing, the roach-infested quarters carved out of any empty space—a storefront, a storage room, a dirt-floor garage—that are the fate of all unwanted people. Victor’s room had only a bed, a chair, and a shelf for all his clothes. Janie accepted money from him every month to help care
for the children, but after a few failed attempts to bridge the deepening canyon, she refused to see him again. And the night life that had been so attractive when he was married held no appeal for him now; he stayed in, read the Sentinel and the California Eagle, and saved and saved his money. He felt both odd and comforted as he walked through the streets where his best friend’s family had first settled in this country. Occasionally, he made the acquaintance of a woman he liked, but all of them were painful reminders of the woman he had loved and let down. Finally, he decided to go back to the Mesa, in order to try and have some kind of life again. And so he used all the money he had set aside over the years and bought a house a mile away from the house he’d grown up in. It wasn’t intentional, but it did seem fitting, that the house was right across the street from his old friend Frank, whom he hadn’t seen since right after the war; who seemed, like himself, quiet and reduced; who’d also made an inglorious return.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
1994